1) Face to face is, in a ton of ways, super different from forum Survivor. Don't come in expecting it to be similar beyond the core fundamentals2) First impressions are incredibly important, and you make your first impressions with body language. Relaxed, open body language will invite people to want to talk to you and trust you.3) You are no longer communicating over PMs with people! This is absolutely huge in a ton of ways:3a) Be cognizant of the fact that people can literally eavesdrop on your conversations. Try to find isolated places to talk, and keep your voice down.3b) People can see who you are talking with when. Managing how much time you spend with people is a very important skill. Spending too much time or too little time with people can set off red flags (what too much and too little mean are also very contextual).3c) You can have conversations with multiple people in isolation. This makes organizing larger alliances and plans much easier.3d) It is much harder to maintain a large set of lies when you don't have a written record of everything you've said, and lying face to face is much harder than in a PM. Limit the lying a bit.4) People can physically see you idol hunting.4a) Take a buddy idol hunting with you to keep lookout while you search and area.5) Challenge threats in f2f are a much bigger deal. In forum mafia, there are a lot more equalizing factors for challenges. In f2f, there are often a few people who are liable to dominate challenges if you aren't careful.6) Make eye contact with your partners at TC. If they don't reciprocate eye contact, it means something's amiss.7) It's much easier to take things personally f2f than online. Jurors in f2f are going to be more inclined to vote personally than based on arbitrary metrics of "who played the best game."

Congrats! You made it pretty far in the game, but now were voted out. Epically blindsided? Pangonged? Idol'd? Doesn't matter, because you are now a member of the jury!

The jury plays the important role of deciding the winner at the end of the game. What makes Survivor a truly interesting game is the fact that the people who are voted out towards the end ultimately decide the winner. It creates a bunch of super interesting social dynamics with how vote-outs work in the post-merge. Being on the jury, however, also is the single BEST place to be if you want to be ~iconic~. Most people don't remember FTC speeches or answers, but those truly iconic jury speeches? Oh, we remember those.

So, how do you approach the FTC as a juror? Well, the first question is how do you decide who you want to vote for to win? A lot of people will talk about trying to "vote for the person who played the best game," which is a load of subjective bollocks. There is, fundamentally, one question that you need to answer to decide where your jury vote will go, which is the following: Who do I want to win this game?

That's it! Every person asking themselves that question and answering it dictates where the jury votes fall! That said, different people also value different things. Some people value personal relationships, others value what they view as "good strategic play." Most value both, to some degree. As a finalist, you have to worry about what criteria each juror will use, but as a juror, you get to make the rules! It's pretty great.

So, then, there is a spectrum of mindsets that a juror can be in going into an FTC that range between the following: "I am 100% voting for X" and "I have absolutely no idea who to vote for." Jurors can fall anyone within there, with most typically leaning towards voting a certain way, but not being dead-set there. Depending on where your head is, you're going to want to craft your FTC speech in different ways.

There are fundamentally 2 parts to a juror's speech: The speech, and the question. Either of these can be omitted outright, and a juror gets to perform these for each of the finalists. You can even do different things for different finalists (at Survivor Meet, for instance, I only did speeches for 2 finalists, but did a speech+question for the third finalist). Each of these two components are fundamentally different, so I'll talk about the different permutations now:

The Speech: This is where you have the most space to be ~iconic~ as a juror - ESPECIALLY if you do a speech with no question. A lot of the greatest Survivor moments are jury speeches: Snakes and Rats, Reality is Reality, and The Wicked Stepmother are all well-remembered jury speeches. There are, fundamentally, two types of speeches.

The first type of speech is the contextualization speech. This is given in conjunction with a question to a finalist/the finalists. It primarily serves to provide context around the question that's about to be asked. John Carroll's speech in Marquesas is a strong example of this type of speech. It gives the juror's a lens through which to understand what you are asking and why. These are a relatively easy type of speech to write, so I won't go into too much detail here. Basically, if you're asking a question, use the speech portion to frame the question so that the finalists really understand what you're looking for from them.

The second type of speech, and the more iconic type, is the tonal speech. These can either be bitter or laudatory. They are designed to apply pressure or relieve pressure from finalists, and to try to sway the rest of the jury toward voting for the juror's finalist of choice. All of those iconic speeches I listed above fall into this category. This type of speech can't be forced, though. This type of speech is best when it's authentic and raw, as it should involve you as a juror pouring some of your heart out in that FTC to make the finalists understand how you REALLY feel. You should absolutely only use this speech type if you are 100% voting for someone in an FTC.

The first step to writing a tonal speech is to understand what you're trying to convey. Use your time in Ponderosa (jury quarantine) to really think through your emotions. Why did X hurt you so much? Why do you want Y to win so badly? Start taking down notes, jotting ideas for talking points. Literary references and metaphors, in particular, can help you come across more strongly. You can also think about the lens through which you want to express your point. Snakes and Rats was a powerful speech because Sue Hawk invoked the nature they were in to invoke her feelings about Richard and Kelly's play. Reed Kelly's Wicked Stepmother speech played off the Blood vs. Water theme of San Juan del Sur for added effect. The lens through which you tell the story can have as much of an impact as the story itself. Additionally, you don't want to speech to come across as rehearsed, so don't practice it in front of a mirror. Know the points you want to hit, and then make it an authentic outpour of emotion after that.

And the final thing: Don't be afraid to be mean, but the lines of human decency are still in play. If the finalist hurt you, they should know that, and they should feel a bit of that pain as well. Obviously don't cross any lines of calling them [bigoted slur] or w/e, but a good bitter speech will have its digs. A good example of a speech crossing the line was Corinne Kaplan's Dead Father speech. Don't do that - that is a speech that is remembered for the wrong reasons. Wicked Stepmother, Snakes and Rats, Eliza's I Don't Envy Your Position in Life - those are all good.

One final note - a jury can't be made up entirely of people giving only tonal speeches. Typically, only 1-2 jurors will feel strongly enough to give tonal speeches with no questions attached. Let those jurors who feel strongest about someone in the final do the pure tonal speech. That said, a lot of questions can be framed by a short tonal speech.

Questions: The second part of the FTC speech is the question. Questions can serve, fundamentally, 3 purposes:

1) To try to gather information to better inform one's vote2) To troll/attack a contestant3) To troll the game

Let me start with #3. #3 is Greg Buis's "Pick a Number" (which Kelly Wigglesworth brought back epically in Second Chances). Someone asking this type of question typically already knows who they're voting for, or they are fine getting the requisite information from other people's questions. Typically this type of question is asked by someone who was a ~goofy character~ trying to further that image.

#1 is the most common type of question. Most juror's typically want more information to make their decision. So, what do you ask here? That's on you! Make sure you think hard about what pieces of information you need from the finalists to inform that decision. A good question to ask yourself is, "Is this question going to get me better information that 'Why should I personally vote for you?'" If the answer is no, you need a better question.

Question type #2 is a play on the tonal speech. You're asking a question either to set up a contestant to fail or to succeed. Heidi Strobel's iconic Which Juror question was an early rendition of the "set someone up to succeed" type, and Lisi Linares's digs On Cassandra and Dreamz were meant to make the contestants look dumb (although Lisi's really just made her look dumb because she chose shitty questions!). Much like the tonal speech, this is a question type that you should only use if you know who you want to win. If someone else is giving the iconic big speech, but you still have some emotion/partisanship you want to convey, this is a good way to do it!

So that's a quick overview of how to approach being a juror. As a juror, you have to remember that your job is very important. The game doesn't end when you're voted out!

I've cast 6 jury votes total b/w live games and f2f/hybrids (to my recollection - I may be missing 1 or 2).

1 of the times (Survivor Meet), I knew 100% who I wanted to vote for in FTC.

1 of the times I knew who I was absolutely NOT voting for in an F3, but it was up in the air b/w the other two. My FTC speech was super fucking angry to the point that it almost ended a friendship (and I fully intended for it to end that friendship when I wrote it).

The rest of the times I didn't know who I was going to vote for. None of those cases were completely identical, but it usually came down to there being a lot of symmetry b/w the finalists in terms of how I perceived their strategic and social play (either because I hadn't worked a ton with any of them, or because the F2/F3 kind of did every move together). I don't think it's necessarily uncommon for jurors not to know who their voting for, although I think it's gotten rarer over time (both in real Survivor and in games that I've played).

In post 85, Lady Lambdadelta wrote:I think the best advice I can give to any newbie is: Be Aggressive

It's so easy to become someone who falls by the wayside, or is a compromise vote, if you play passively.

It's better to overplay your hand than to under play it, because at least in overplaying it, you have the opportunity to salvage, and you're in people's heads and building relationships.

In essence, while shooting a gun is loud, and will draw a lot of attention to you, at least you're firing shots and some of them might even land. And you can use that attention to your advantage if you play it well.

But just be aggressive. don't be afraid of being voted out.

The flip side of this is that it's also easier to start out playing too aggressively, then learning to pull it back than it is to try to wean yourself onto the "right" amount of aggression. This also applies to, like, any game/activity.

In post 93, DeathNote wrote:I do notice that when I Try to do something different, I end up reverting back to my old play style.

I don't think it's possible to actually pivot too far from your playstyle. How you play Survivor is just super tied to who you are as a person, and a lot of it is trying to make your personality work within the game.

In post 96, Lady Lambdadelta wrote:I've never really had an issue with this, but maybe that's just due to my particular brand of identity issues.

I think this may help you out a bit in terms of controlling who you are in games?

Like I have absolutely no ability to play outside of my personality. I may also be the other extreme, though, since I also seem to be easier-than-average to ID in games (although n for this is, like, effectively 1).

It was really dumb being on the LoL jury and having to pretend that me/Matt/Reck/OGML didn't all know who each other were because we'd all had each other ID'd from super, super fucking early (I hadn't even been on a tribe with OGML when I ID'd him because of ~that really great challenge that everyone loved~)

In post 189, CuddlyCaucasian wrote:This isn't really a tip for playing, but something that I thought of after Nexus:

If you don't use your confessional to explain what you're doing, all the spectators will assume you're doing nothing and have no idea what's going on. Even if you're actually playing a great game, no one will have any way to know! They will actively root against you, and you probably won't be happy reading the spectator forums post-game.

Don't make your confessional performance art about perceptions of you through SPV. It's lazy performance art that's been done before.

In post 282, Shadoweh wrote:Pfft yes I'm sure, Harbinger and Liara traded the necklace to reset the game timer and give more time for a lurker to come back and vote.The Immunity Necklace being something you can transfer led to one of the most infamous moments on the show too.

It's only been transferred twice on the show, and one of those times was a mistake.